thinking + motherhood = feminist

Damn dude, you got daddy skills

You can tell a father who has done a stint of serious primary parenting because he can anticipate.

There is fathering – doing half an hour of wrestling play once a day before bed and nothing much else – and then there is fathering, and you can see the difference when you see a dad who knows his shit enough to anticipate needs and problems for children before they happen. It’s a beautiful thing.

This rap song, Daddy Skills (buy it here) refers to a lot of these anticipatory problem-solving skills in parenting. It’s pretty awwwwwwww. The best bit about the song is how these guys are rapping about parenting as a ‘skill’, which is what happens when the workload of parenting is shared more across gender, the work gets credibility.

A local rapper here, Brother Ali, put out an album a few years ago with two really excellent fatherhood songs. In “Eye to Eye” he boasts about single parenting, including potty training, and in this one (“Faheen” after his son) he just praises him, it’s really beautiful:

“I was right there for your first breath
Used to lay you on my chest when you slept
I fed you, changed you, read to you, bathed you
I ain’t tryna’ hold that over your head, I’m saying thank you”